Reunion by Fred Uhlman

I’m going on holiday tomorrow (I’m typing this on the evening of August 3rd), so though I did intentionally choose to read this novella, yes, before having a momentary caesura from the grind of my vapid pleasureless existence, I choose to read this devastating-adjacent novel not for its content but for its size.

I’ve got a massive time travel novel half-recommended to me by (imo) the current best writer producing in English to read on my long long travel day (and night) tomorrow, and because carrying a half-read book in luggage genuinely increases the use of jet fuel (which can’t melt steel beams, right?) and is thus inarguably a morally evil act, I made sure not to start reading something today I couldn’t also finish.

Airplane emissions are increased by bringing a half-read, rather than a fresh, book on a flight as this is superfluous weight; knowing this, and tending towards bizarre moral absolutes, I picked one of the shortest books on my shelf to read during my last night in London. It might be small, but it is impactful!

If you’ve read my most acclaimed work to date, the pleasure of regret (Broken Sleep Books, 2020), you’ll likely be incredibly familiar with the opening essay about an intense late teenage friendship: Reunion opens – and is for about half its length – exactly the same thing.

Dancing on the romance-friendship line, it is about a middle class young Jewish youth and his intense bond with an aristocratic young Protestant youth, bonding over shared interests in art and culture and being, somehow, “different to the other boys” at school.

Why have I mentioned religion? Because the novella is set in the early nineteen thirties in rural Germany and the posh lad’s parents turn out to be massive fucking Nazis…

Reunion moves from adolescent crush-obsession-friendship to a confrontation that fizzles and then shows the slow erosion of companionship after the trust and the hope is extinguished…

The final chapter is set decades in the future when the protagonist (who was evacuated from Germany to the USA while that was still an option) is sent a yearbook from his high school, listing all of the students who died in the Second World War. Here, he sees the fate of bullies, of nice boys and, of course, his best friend-boyfriend. It’s a brief few pages but as a coda, it is deeply affecting.

Uhlman’s prose is clear and direct, evocative and descriptive yet not dry or unrefined.

In under 80 pages, Uhlman covers first love and desire and romance and youth, which is impressive on its own, but he also explores and demonstrates the human costs of bigotry, genocide, evacuation, displacement, political violence, corruption, suicide, trauma, hopelessness and also art and creativity and beauty and joy. It’s got it all!

It’s a tiny sliver of a book, but it’s a very good one!

I bought it in a charity shop in the Peak District (I think it was Bakewell like the tart but it may have been Eccles like the cake??? Somewhere northern with a dessert name?) during a very scenic and way too big detour en route to my recent weekend in the Lake District. I’ve never heard of it elsewhere, but I wish I had!

An interesting, powerful and serious novella – well worth a look!

Next post coming to you from somewhere far away from Tott’nam!!!